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Friday, 4 February 2011

We are coming to the close of the third week of voters’ registration in Nigeria; the exercise was after much anxiety extended for another week just 24 hours to the end of the original 14-day plan.

When the INEC Chairman met the Joint Committee on Electoral Matters at the Nigerian National Assembly he suggested that just one extra week would be needed to clear the backlog of unregistered possible voters.

Numbers and fumblers

The projection was to register 70 million Nigerians for the April 2011 elections, at the end of the two week period it was said that 59 million had been registered at the rate of 4.3 million people a day, however, with 48 hours to run, this number was revised downwards with 54.9 million having been registered at the rate of 3.2 million people a day.

That great discrepancy in figures is worrisome because it suggests the estimators were out by 1.1 million people per day, meaning that at the end of the first 14 day period, the figures were grossly inflated by 14.2 million prospective voters.

Many will lose out

Looking at the figures, it then suggests that about 44.8 million voters were registered by Saturday the 29th of January 2011 and by the 3rd of February 2011 another 10.1 million voters had been added to the tally leaving an estimated 15.1 million Nigerians left to avail themselves of registration in the last 48 hours.

There is no way that number would be catered for and it appears INEC might just get to 62 million at best with 8 million seemingly disenfranchised and that might be due to a number of factors from poor logistics and planning (observed as overcrowded polling units), malfunctioning registration equipment or procrastination and apathy on the part of Nigerians.

#INECregistration, We are down to one DDC for now. The second one's overheating so it's been shut down to receive 'fresh air'.

There is probably no case for extending the registration period beyond the 5th of February 2011, we had all been adequately informed, it could have been properly planned for, the people could have taken time to ensure that they were registered despite the frustrating situations they might have encountered and it could have been dealt with, with a great sense of civic responsibility for what the 2011 elections mean for Nigeria.

The logistics issues remained but not as grave as they were at the beginning, it was more about the inadequate supply of DDC machines to meet the demand and a few instances of the inability of the registered to collect their cards and where they have, the cards may not have been laminated.

AkwaImoh#INECRegistrationsome centres in my Location are not laminating the Voters Card. And this doesn't help people because it will be hard to maintain

Some criminality had also been observed of people being charged to register or print their cards, in other cases people were registering in order to sell their cards to the highest bidder.

That latter situation should if the technical specification of the registration dynamics are as we are told root out people who are using false identities because pictures and fingerprints have to match to validate a voter and allow the person participate in voting.

However, there would be many who would try to game the system.

It is not mandatory

The illegalities include making having a voter’s registration card to access goods and services in Nigeria, that is unconstitutional; it is within the rights of each citizens to decide to participate in the electoral process or not. However, if such a person does not participate, it would be of concern if the said person then feels they have assumed the right to criticise how they are governed.

The next stage which could be fraught with issues is the collation of the voters register where the data on the DDC machines and the external hard disks are fed into the super computer that would process all the information and eventually produce a voters list that can be inspected by users.

If INEC do in fact capture 88% of the electorate and the turnout for elections exceeds 70% of that number, we might well have the makings of credible elections if the votes are counted as the voters have intended.

There is one day left and it is worrisome to hear that there are many especially amongst the youth who have not risen to the revolutionary opportunity to rise, speak up and let their voices be heard about the direction of their country.